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Stabilizer comments on Bad Concepts Repository - Less Wrong
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There is a cultural heuristic (especially in Eastern cultures) that we should respect older people by default. Now, this is not a useless heuristic, as the fact that older people have had more life experiences is definitely worth taking into account. But at least in my case (and I suspect in many other cases), the respect accorded was disproportionate to their actual expertise in many domains.
The heuristic can be very useful when respecting the older person is not really a matter of whether he/she is right or wrong, but more about appeasing power. It can be very useful to distinguish between the two situations.
How old is the "older" person? 30? 60? 90? In the last case, respecting a 90-years old person is usually not about appeasing power.
It seems more like retirement insurance. A social contract that while you are young, you have to respect old people, so that while you are old, you will get respect from young people. Depends on what specifically "respecting old people" means in given culture. If you have to obey them in their irrational decisions, that's harmful. But if it just means speaking politely to them and providing them hundred trivial advantages, I would say it is good in most situations.
Specifically, I am from Eastern Europe, where there is a cultural norm of letting old people sit in the mass transit. As in: you see an old person near you, there are no free places to sit, so you automatically stand up and offer the old person to sit down. The same for pregnant women. (There are some seats with a sign that requires you to do this, but the cultural norm is that you do it everywhere.) -- I consider this norm good, because for some people the difference in utility between standing and sitting is greater than for average people. (And of course, if you have a broken leg or something, that's an obvious exception.) So it was rather shocking for me to hear about cultures where this norm does not exist. Unfortunately, even in my country in recent decades this norm (and the politeness is general) is decreasing.
But I think that in America today, we don't respect older people enough. Heck, we don't often even acknowledge their existence. Count what fraction of the people you pass on the street today are "old". Then count what fraction of people you see on TV or in the movies are old.
I think that our age cohorted Lord of the Flies educational system has much to do with "we" being age cohorted as well.
It is not surprising that there aren't a proportional number of old people in TV/movies right now. And I suspect there never were. TV/movie audience desire to view people who possess high-status markers. Two important markers are beauty and power. In reality, younger people typically have beauty but not much power. Older people have more power and less beauty. Since TV/movies don't have the constraints of reality, we can make young people who are beautiful also powerful. We can rarely make old people beautiful with some exceptions, which TV/movies often exploit. I don't think this has anything to do with respect.
This is a contradiction.
Sorry if it was confusing but you are taking it out of context. I actually meant: the fact that we don't have a proportional number of old people in TV/movies as in real life is not because we respect old people less in real life. It is simply a reflection of the freedoms available in TV/movies.
More relevant to the social reasons for the heuristic, they have also had more time to accrue power and allies. For most people that is what respect is about (awareness of their power to influence your outcomes conditional on how much deference you give them).
Oh, yes, those were the two points I prepared in response to your first paragraph. You nailed both, exactly!
Signalling social deference and actually considering an opinion to be strong Bayesian evidence need not be the same thing.